Interdependence and the cost of uncoordinated responses to COVID-19
Name
2009522117.full.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
13.25 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
4b511c49a832730dda09295d7c0fd977
Author(s)
Holtz, David Michael
Zhao, Michael (Michael F.)
Benzell, Seth Gordon
Cao, Cathy Y.
Rahimian, Mohammad Amin
Yang, Jeremy
Allen, Jennifer
Collis, Avinash
Moehring, Alex
Sowrirajan, Tara
Date Issued
July 2020
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publisher
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Citation
Holtz, David et al. "Interdependence and the cost of uncoordinated responses to COVID-19." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published online (July 2020): doi 10.1073/pnas.2009522117 ©2020 Author(s)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Social distancing is the core policy response to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). But, as federal, state and local governments begin opening businesses and relaxing shelter-in-place orders worldwide, we lack quantitative evidence on how policies in one region affect mobility and social distancing in other regions and the consequences of uncoordinated regional policies adopted in the presence of such spillovers. To investigate this concern, we combined daily, county-level data on shelter-in-place policies with movement data from over 27 million mobile devices, social network connections among over 220 million Facebook users, daily temperature and precipitation data from 62,000 weather stations, and county-level census data on population demographics to estimate the geographic and social network spillovers created by regional policies across the United States. Our analysis shows that the contact patterns of people in a given region are significantly influenced by the policies and behaviors of people in other, sometimes distant, regions. When just one-third of a state’s social and geographic peer states adopt shelter-in-place policies, it creates a reduction in mobility equal to the state’s own policy decisions. These spillovers are mediated by peer travel and distancing behaviors in those states. A simple analytical model calibrated with our empirical estimates demonstrated that the “loss from anarchy” in uncoordinated state policies is increasing in the number of noncooperating states and the size of social and geographic spillovers. These results suggest a substantial cost of uncoordinated government responses to COVID-19 when people, ideas, and media move across borders.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
10.1073/pnas.2009522117
